DACCARRETTE, MICHEL (sometimes written Daccarette, Dacaret, d’Acaret, etc., but he signed Daccarrette), merchant, shipowner; b. 1730 at Louisbourg, Île Royale (Cape Breton Island), first and only surviving son of Michel Daccarrette (d. 1745) and Catherine Gonillon; d. in 1767 in Paris.

Michel Daccarrette, with the other members of his family, was evacuated from Louisbourg after the siege of 1745 during which his father died. In 1749 he returned to Louisbourg with the family of the merchant Philippe de Beaubassin, who had married his eldest sister Marie-Charlotte.

In 1753 Daccarrette married Marguerite, daughter of Jean La Borde*, treasurer of the Marine and royal notary at Louisbourg. By the marriage contract La Borde gave the couple 1,500 livres plus free lodgings for three years; Daccarrette contributed 4,000 livres. Perhaps it was no coincidence that in the same year he began to supply wood to the king’s stores. He continued to supply the stores occasionally, usually with wood, but once with a shipment of rifles. In 1753 the tangled question of his father’s succession was settled and Daccarrette received one-third of his father’s stocks and equipment in return for concessions of land and houses to other relatives. In 1754 Daccarrette moved to enter the fishing trade with the purchase of the Île Michaux (Michaud Ledges) in partnership with Pierre de La Forest, ensign of the troops in garrison at Louisbourg. In 1756 he owned a privateer, the Heureux, which captured a Rhode Island whaler, the New Brunswick; in 1758 he is known to have outfitted another privateer, the Revanche. During the siege of Louisbourg in 1758, the company of militia formed by the merchants of the town and commanded by Daccarrette performed with distinction and energy.

With the fall of the fortress Daccarrette moved to Bordeaux, France, where he set up as a merchant in 1759, outfitting one privateer sent to Martinique under Portuguese colours in 1759 and at least two others, under the Spanish flag, in 1762. In these ventures, as in the outfitting of a schooner for Saint-Domingue (Hispaniola) in 1763 and a 16-gun frigate, the Vigilante, he seems to have been using funds provided by his father-in-law who gave him credit facilities in Bordeaux and elsewhere after 1759. These operations appear to have been unsuccessful.

In March 1763, suspected of complicity in La Borde’s fraudulent mismanagement of government funds at Louisbourg, Daccarrette was arrested and imprisoned in the Bastille. By August he had obtained Laborde’s release by proposing to abandon all of the latter’s possessions to the crown, but in December his house in Bordeaux burned to the ground, destroying all his effects, records, and commercial papers including those of his father-in-law. The charges against Daccarrette were dropped and he was released around February 1764. Undaunted, he began a third time to build up his fortunes, but he died on a trip to Paris in 1767, while attempting to obtain some relief from the ministry. According to his widow he left behind a family of seven, four known to have been born in Louisbourg and the rest probably after his return to France.

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